Brutally Honest Advice for Content Creators

Right looks like we're live hey everybody thanks for being here um today I'm going to save lots of time most of the time for Q&A we can discuss whatever topics you want to um my primary focus today is to talk about overall direction for blogging in general um and really where we're going for this channel I do need to start by sharing some of my thoughts about internet marketing about Google and things that I'm seeing so um I'll start by saying this I have had some comments on this channel um on videos that lead me

to believe that I'm not being totally clear about what it is I'm talking about historically people have viewed this channel as a blogging Channel and despite our best efforts even from the earliest days with uh Jim and I we tried to keep it broader than that we' always tried to have it be an internet marketing channel um have it be a learn to make money mostly on the Internet type Channel um and yet the content that seemed to resonate the best with you with this audience was always blogging and SEO content so that's the majority

of what we talk about here um in this last year so far uh we've seen so many changes in the blogging landscape especially driven of course by Google as well as by AI um and because of that we are trying to help you adapt we're trying to help you steer things in a Direction that's going to work better Um and yet I get comments in my videos still that just make it clear to me that some people are just not getting it so I'm G to be clear here in this video today but we're going

to take again all the questions you have so thank you all for being here um let me be clear right now about what it is that I'm talking about one I do not recommend that you build just a Blog and that is your whole business Niche websites not something that I recommend Doing um if your goal is just create content attract traffic and make passive income from that traffic uh it's not going to work anymore and when I say create content I'm specifically talking about blog content if we're just writing written content on the internet

and trying to get lots of traffic it's not going to work the reason for that is that business model required a lot of traffic when we make pennies per person it's hard to make a great income unless You're getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of views every single month to your blog and right now through organic traffic a search traffic especially that's just that's just not working okay um number two I do not recommend depending on Google search for large amounts of traffic Google search is still bringing us traffic all the time but not

nearly in the numbers that we're used to seeing because of that I'm I'm not going To focus as much effort on creating a ton of blog content um that's geared toward trying to get search traffic yes there are other search engines um yes we get traffic from those but my content that I'm going to create for my website specifically is going to be geared toward being a great resource and it's going to be geared toward being the kind of content that makes people want to stay on my website and it makes people remember it and

want to come back that's How we build a brand by having a very good experience with people when they come to our site um but I'm also not going to rely on just Google to bring me that traffic in the first place we need to use other platforms other tools to drive that traffic I don't care which ones you use we for years have been using and and encouraging the use of um of YouTube video today is still the biggest um Gabriel nice to see you too um there there's the comments um it Always takes

a minute so it's always good for me to have something to say at the very beginning um but really this is important stuff um video is still the biggest opportunity and it's a place where one AI proliferation is it just does not have the same hold it does there the same opportunity isn't there yes you can create AI generated videos no they're not as good um and people will crave and will con just they do crave and will continue to Crave that human connection um will some people succeed at it yes anything I say you

can probably find at least one exception on the internet if I tell you something's not a great idea you can probably find an exception on the internet that doesn't mean it's a good idea for everyone to go and try all right number three when I talk about eat um and I'm talking about first of all when I say eat I'm using that terminology from Google because it's What you and I usually understand but when I talk about that I'm talking about it from The Stance of building a brand building true Authority and reputation on the

internet when I talk about brand building participating in the industry living your Niche I'm not just talking about that so that you will rank better on Google Now caveat to that doing those things will give you a much better chance of ranking better on Google they just will Okay but that's not the only reason or even the primary reason you should do those things okay um do it to build a reputation with real people do it so that when people do come across your content they are helped and they want to come back okay um

I alluded to this earlier number four I do not recommend making a Blog in the hopes of just posting content and making passive income ads and affiliate marketing are good monetization options but they Require a lot of traffic if that is your entire business model you're probably not going to make as much money anymore as you were able to make not that long ago it's just changed we need to think of ourselves as a real business if your goal is passive income go invest in an index fund you won't make as much money but you're

pretty much guaranteed passive income unless the whole economy turns okay if you're looking for get-rich quick go find something else Content creation isn't the place for you what I do recommend treat what you're doing as a real business and not I don't just mean that in the sense of like um thinking of it as a business or whatever like actually have it be a business come up with a business model which means you know a business model is like how do I get paid what is the thing where people actually want to transact money with

me now if you're coming into this thinking well I'm starting with something that's My hobby I was just creating content I don't have a big plan for what I'm going to sell that's okay I know that that's the standpoint a lot of people come into this with that's okay a lot of opportunities will open as you start doing this but from the very beginning open yourself up to the idea of at least some kind of Consulting you can consult on anything we've used the example many times of like if your hobby is you're a pretty

good tennis player or maybe You're a quite good tennis player and you want to create content around tennis first of all blog content fine video content is better you can teach better with video but second of all if you're going to um if you want to consult or something it's not that hard to um to sell a consult option where somebody um sends you a video of them doing their forehand over and over and over again and you can identify what things they're doing wrong and you can give them Specific guidance maybe even make a

little video response showing them this is what you're doing you need to change it from this to this and it can be very easy for you to do because you have that knowledge but you have to have the knowledge you can't just like make a bunch of content using AI to generate all of the thoughts and then put content out there and have it be successful AI when it comes to knowledge is going to try to take all the information out There and come up with sort of an average that is most likely to be

the consensus but I think a lot of us who've been using the internet for a long time know that just because something is a consensus on the internet does not make it true or helpful so real experience from real people is more beneficial so um think about what you can serve to customers that's of real value and when you do that you're going to make a heck Of a lot more money per visit to your site to your YouTube channel to your social media you can make a lot more money per visit on on average

when you have something real to sell but also when you're a legitimate business Google likes that better also so it helps with the Google issue but again we're not depending on the Google issue um it makes the Google issue also less important does that make sense we need a lot less traffic when we have Something of real value to sell versus just relying on a few pennies per person um from ad revenue or some affiliate Revenue okay but in the process of doing that will be more successful with Google so to be very clear the

focus of this channel is not blogging the focus of this channel is business how to succeed with a small a very small or small or midsize business in a world where digital marketing is key I have been talking over the last several weeks with Numerous business owners me and my team we've been out networking like crazy talking to them about what their needs are and what they want and everybody every like business we are talking to out there is starving for what you and I already know how to do that's what they need and to

some extent it's blog content but for the most part like a strong web presence social media video is a big one a lot of people are like man we don't have the Tools we don't have the knowledge inous to do this or the time um but we really need it uh and it's a huge opportunity in fact something that we're doing we're like getting out there hitting the pavement and just helping businesses by doing things for them not just teaching um you could do that too if you have this knowledge and these skills and you

just lost all your income because Google stole it um or redirected it to Reddit um get Scrappy go do something make Something happen Okay I want to dig into your questions now we're going to talk about we can talk about websites and blog related stuff that's still part of what we do um obviously right now we're in the middle of a Google core algorithm update and so we can talk a little bit about that um but also I'm open to discussion around kind of this new Direction anything and everything related to content marketing and online

business let me grab some water and Let's go ahead and start taking some questions um all right going back to the beginning um electrical faults fix do you think the next update will reset the helpful content rather than mostly Reddit and Kora um no I don't think Google's going to reset anything I think what's going to happen is a move forward now we're already seeing some websites that got slammed by helpful content we're already starting To see some start to recover the original helpful content update um that's not even in the algorithm anymore what happened

in March the signals Google put out in March in that update um that changed the game on what Google views as authoritative so they're just being way harsher on what they're viewing as authoritative um and and likely to be accurate um and it's it's been a little bit hard to nail down I don't think Anybody has firm answers on What It Takes other than um being one of Google's business partners um or being user generated content in general um you know forums where it's users creating the content and that's frustrating because frankly if I really

want wanted to do my marketing on Reddit all I would have to do is go answer questions on Reddit and I could use AI to answer people's questions and it would still be AI generated trash anyway I don't think They're going to roll anything back I think they're going to keep moving forward and I do think it's going to improve and give more opportunities to websites um with good helpful content on them but I don't think it's going to be a good idea going forward to just appear as an independent individual block um I think

we need to try to put a little bit more behind ourselves that doesn't mean we need to look like a big Corporation and have tons of writers and Whatever but I do think that we need to have a purpose on the internet other than just answering people's questions and trying to sell them affiliate or you know get them to click our affiliate links um and to be fair like a lot of you are doing it and always we're doing it the right way to be as helpful as possible but that business business model attracted so

much garbage that the internet just is has been filled for years now with affiliate marketers Who've never touch the products they're recommending and I just don't understand how you could realistically recommend a product especially if you're recommending a specific product if you have no experience with that product it's just in fact I see um I see different organizations trying to find ways to get around that so you know you've probably seen on Amazon the Amazon influencer program people are literally like making videos and posting Them straight on Amazon and if those videos are watched in

the process of somebody making a purchase they get a commission even though they didn't attract the person to Amazon because they helped make the sale but in those videos it's people with the product in hand people are doing lives I I've actually had a company reach out to me for Pantry preparedness about literally during the next prime day doing live content being stream live streaming Showing the product answering questions about the product showing how it the usefulness of a product all of that stuff because The Internet's been so filled even Amazon reviews are so full

of fake reviews that it's hard to trust anything but video is substantially more trustworthy when I can show you the actual product and answer your questions in real time um or even not in real time I can you can still answer questions you can take Those questions from Amazon and you can make an influencer video literally helping answer those questions and get paid for that it's pretty cool all right um Le says is it normal to get no traffic on a nine-month old blog with 25 blog posts right now yeah um now if you have

25 blog posts over the course of nine months like that's that's not a bad start to a website I'm gonna put in the effort to start building eat I'm going to start trying to build a Reputation um I'm gonna have a YouTube video here soon about I've many times I've said go get interviewed on podcasts that's an easy place to start um I'm going to show that process what it looks like to actually like identify podcasts um you know write up my email or proposal contact find the contact info and contact podcast hosts um prepare

for an interview I'll show you how many interviews I get how many people I had to contact to get them um and I'm doing That in again my preparedness Niche where I don't have a bunch of clout yet I just have a website and I have a YouTube channel with not even 2,000 subscribers so I'm not gonna be doing that as Ricky I'm gonna be doing that as well Ricky but on P preparedness um anyway if I were you that's where I would go I would start working on some eat stuff um and I would

also look at your content and make sure that you're building it in topical clusters it's Still really important whether or not it's going to attract a ton of Google traffic but it's really important for the user experience when somebody comes to your website and they do find an answer to one of their questions but they see that you have all this other helpful content around the same topic that's really valuable rather than a whole bunch of random answers to random questions in an nich so make sure that you're doing that um and that you're Just

focused on for your blog I'm focusing Less on creating content that's necessarily um created with the intent to to do really well in the algorithm right we used to write articles that very clearly this is the question this is the answer now in in part that was because we wanted to be really helpful to the reader but also we wanted it to be obvious to the algorithm what questions we were answering um I'm not as worried About that I'm just worried about helpfulness to the person um I want the experience to be as good as

possible for them um so that's where I'm headed not all my written content is is to that standard right now but that's where I'm moving it okay next question do you think Reddit planned to add uh red is planning to add pay walls and help bring back more search traffic to blogs um oh do you think having pay walls will bring Back I would think so um I know a lot of people outside of the our industry right outside of blogging who have definitely noticed the quality of gole Google search go down um and who

basically skip page one of Google it's like reddit reddit reddit a whole bunch of YouTube videos which can be really helpful so they might skim through those and then maybe one or two actual articles whether or not they're written on a um by a blogger or by a uh you know well-known Journal or something like that those like article content is not ranking at the very top almost ever if Google can point to Reddit they point to to Reddit or some other Forum even if it's a thread from 2007 they'll point to that um it's

crazy and so a lot of people are skipping um my wife it drives her crazy if she sees the word sponsored in front of a search result she doesn't even look at it I don't either but my wife's not a blogger like she hasn't been creating This content she's not an SEO person she's just a normal user of the internet and she just skips it um anyway she wants the thing that is most not the thing that somebody paid to get in front of her so I think that behavior is starting um go Reddit putting

up pay walls that's only going to help um I don't pay to get to content behind pay walls almost ever unless it's actually something I really want to be subscribed to I'm sorry I'm not going to subscribe To Reddit just so that I can see what a bunch of people said on the internet um I stopped myself from saying what I was going to say social media including forums like Reddit have a lot of value but man there's an awful lot of negativity there's an awful lot of people just wanting to tear each other down

um drives me crazy there's also a lot of misinformation but I guess that's our prerogative all right um has anyone here Recovered from hcu yet anakah asks um from what we're still reading basically no one's recovered if you lost a bunch of traffic from hcu you haven't recovered from that um it just hasn't happen again that's where I'm like don't count on getting hundreds of thousands of page views maybe ever again unless you completely change now I did talk to a project I've actually heard from several project 24 members who told me they didn't lose

Traffic many did but some who have told me they didn't I I was in a mastermind in Project 24 the other day any of you in Project 24 who missed that we talked about um YouTube and blog content and sort of synergizing that content having them linked together creating really good resources on your website which we'll also talk about more on this channel going forward um but he shared a strategy that he's been Using and he said he didn't lose traffic in March didn't happen and first of all that's incredible but second of all his

strategy was awesome and it was a really like it wasn't even like like super unique it's been done before we've done it before none of our websites currently have it right now um that's going to change to but uh man it he's taken it to like next level just gone crazy with that but this guy's also like an amazing content creator he just Creates and creates and creates um and doesn't ever seem to get burned out of that which is also pretty incredible so I I wouldn't think about recovery I'd think about what it looks

like to move forward um and what that business model is going to look like going forward um I don't think I would ever plan on um being successful with the old blogging business model of super passive income just write blog posts I don't think it's GNA happen um all Right uh valik says traffic's improving a bit but mostly coming from other search engines um yeah most of my organic traffic on my sites is not Google um but ranking just fine on all the others um yeah no great great input from everybody on that question um

valik says discovered an easy way of creating YouTube videos one shot videos turn on the camera record a video and one shot upload it I'm up to 62 videos in 62 days it's much easier keep it Simple on this very channel the first several videos that Jim and I recorded he had he had this studio set up in his home office and he had it because he was doing this for improve photography he was doing a lot of podcasting where he'd have guests and it was all video recorded So he had like he had two

big cameras on the wall he had one I think just down in front of us he had a TV behind us um that he could also like screencast it it was all On a switch on the desk and he had a big TV in front of us where he could see that was the monitor so that we could see what was being shown or what was recorded So he had this little switch board and he just pressed another button um on this board and it would switch between cameras and so we would sit down um

he'd give me the topic I wouldn't even know what it was ahead of time usually um we'd talk through it for a few minutes and then he'd hit record and Then we'd start talking when I was talking he'd switch it to the camera that more pointed at me a lot of the time it would be on the camera that was kind of more on both of us um if he was talking there was one kind of on him every now and then we might have something that we would show like on the TV behind us

very rarely did we use that but he would just have it live switching in real time multiple cameras I'm not suggesting you do this by the way um and When it was done I remember the first time you recorded uh it finished and I was like all right cool well there were a couple things in there where I kind of fumbled and stuff are you going to be editing that at all he's like nope and he was sitting there literally uploading it to YouTube that moment like there wasn't even trimming the ends it was just

like we hit record we start talking he hits end at the end and that's it we're done upload to Youtube Then later we switched and we decided first of all he took down that whole setup stopped using it so we switched to a cell phone and we set his iPhone on the desk on a little tripod hit record but same thing no edit videos we did that for quite a while it wasn't until we started doing some kind of fun intros and some some of that kind of stuff that we started doing some very basic

editing and our editing has evolved from there but I tell you Like a 20-minute video took 20 minutes to record and edit that was it you can do that um especially if you have actual knowledge and experience in your Niche and um you don't have to be perfect nobody on YouTube is expecting Perfection nobody on the internet I mean okay some people expect Perfection and on social media some people are just mean but for the most part what people are craving more than anything this year um the trend in YouTube is Authenticity and some channels

where literally they're just like just hitting record and going for like I mean look up Sam suck the guy first of all he's um huge and muscular and stuff but he's just like going to the gym or going to the store to buy his food and stuff and like recording for very long periods of time and the guy was just getting huge views on this stuff not saying that's going to work for everybody but authenticity so I love That it's a great advice f um what does it mean to be an official business in Google's

view have something to sell and sell that thing on the internet and make it clear to Google that you sell that thing one way to do that is create a Google Business listing I've had a lot of people tell me you can't create a Google Business listing unless you would actually ever meet with anybody in in real life not just Virtually say okay well if you do consults virtually over the internet but somebody who lives near you were to schedule a consult and asks to do it in person would you be willing to consider doing

that if the answer is yes then you have an in-person business even if you don't have an office um you know on your Google listing you can list a service area around you of people where you would actually work with them in real life in person Um I was watching yesterday um Nathan gotch from gotch SEO he put out a video talking about this latest update and the things he's seeing the sites that are starting to recover the most and the sites that are are winning right now and of course forums and user generated content

specifically Reddit number one right but next on that list mostly local businesses and other business type uh websites where they actually have something to Sell they're ranking for search queries not just locally they're ranking for search queries all over the world you could have literally a plumber from here in Idaho ranking for a plumbing related question just in general on the internet where before it would probably be a blogger ranking for those kinds of things and that local business would mostly rank for those questions locally now they're off and ranking for everything because it's more

trustworthy Um you know somebody who actually does business with people and where people could leave reviews on the Internet it's a lot easier to believe that person's an actual person than just some blogger who might have even created a fake persona with an actual photo and everything but who knows if they're real or not I think that's one of the things Google Google is having to cope with in this age of AI this proliferation of AI generated trash content has made it really really Hard and so you know Google's looking for those other signals so

be a real business create something to sell that's why I said earlier if nothing else sell a consultation and it doesn't even have to be in real time the easiest thing you can do is just like create a worksheet that somebody has to fill out that basically gives you a list of all their questions and all their concerns that they want you to help them with and then You literally just record a response you could even write a response but we always found it easier and faster just to either audio or video record a response

um and just do those consults helping people with a problem related to your Niche it's probably the easiest thing you could sell starting like today all right um okay what do you know about Pinterest traffic anomalies I experienced a 95% drop in Pinterest image Impressions 90% Drop in clicks to articles um no terms violations some of this is seasonality and stuff I haven't been as active on Pinterest for that long but Cara project 24 member who literally teaches Pinterest um and created our course for us she alerted us that you know probably few weeks ago

she says looks like Pinterest is hitting their normal summer cleanup session I can't remember what she called it but basically like accounts that looked like Spam accounts um accounts that were posting way too much um just doing anything that looks questionable to Pinterest they were getting um slammed she even said she had one account that um that got what was the word um they have a word for it but basically the account was it more like it was flagged but essentially it was shut down temporarily and then you appeal it and she got it back

like the next day um and so it's Really easy for Pinterest to look at your account and be like oh I don't know this might be kind of sketchy and then just boom turn it off but unlike most online Brands um especially the big ones they actually listen to appeals um I don't have anything against Amazon or Facebook who don't even care one bit about whether or not they got it wrong um yeah no problem with that at all I hope you can sense the sarcasm um no so she got it back right away but

she was Saying that not only does that happen but there also tends to be kind of a summer slump and that summer slump can be anything from a little bit of a dip to a pretty big drop off um it just kind of is how it is in fact our cook for folks account that she's been working on she's she told me ahead of time that she expected it to happen and then it happened and it dropped a whole bunch and then she said but she she was like um October November those are going to

Do really well usually September does as well I'm creating a bunch of content for that and so I'm expecting it to do really well through basically the rest of the year and I already know that the early part of next year it won't do as well people aren't looking for recipes and cooking stuff most of the time January through March um there just isn't any of that so some of that seasonality within the N Niche some of it is just Pinterest kind of seasonality Which seems weird but apparently is a real phenomenon so that could

be a big part of it if you don't have any like violations but you saw a big swing it could just be the huge Pinterest slump that tends to happen hey Carl thanks for being here um thanks all of you for being here um kamic Kazi says what if they just rolled it back and called it an update that'd be nice it would be nice um you know What oftentimes it would be nice if when big changes happen we could just like undo the change and just carry on um it's usually not how things work

usually um in the name of progress we continue forward whether or not you agree with that progress you can either get on board or you can get left behind uh it's just the way of things and so um best to understand it and make a a good decision about what you want to do if you've been working on a Blog for a couple years now And you were getting close maybe you were making some good money and it just got hammered you have a choice do do I try to be a real business do I

social media or if nothing else a podcast like podcast you can do very little equipment you're not on camera you don't have to be very polished you just talk um and podcasts can do really well just have to learn the right way to do it to get into spread otherwise you just talk to nobody Forever um you know but are you going to Pivot or do you just decide this isn't for me anymore if that's the case that's fine if it's not for you like okay I'm I'm done with this I'm going to go find

another way there are lots of ways to make a good living um I told you I've been talking to business owners I mean was talking to a guy who um literally had a contractor come out to his house to install things on his windows um and they got talking they really liked him The product did really really well for him and he ended up buying the business from the from the guy now he's growing that business and he's built on three other businesses that have adjacent offerings like the guy's making great money now just literally

doing something that like pretty much anybody could learn to do and go do um you could start a business like that from scratch you could go start a service business if you Want to take control of your income there are Million Ways To Do It um this is one that you can start from your home and you can do it while you work another job uh it's doesn't cost a bunch of money to get into and that's why it's been so appealing but my recommendation is if you want to take control of your income don't

look for um promises that it's going to make you a lot of money or that it's going to Make it really really fast um both of those things tend to be pretty Hollow there are situations where people have made a lot of money really really fast often times times it's either kind of an illegitimate thing or they got in early before it was trendy if you wait until something is a proven model by that point now you've got competition um it's true with mlms I have family members who got in like early days I've got

a a friend a Neighbor who um his dad got into he got in with the company metap fast became Tak Shape for Life and is now opava but he was like one of the first hundred people like yeah there's a lot of money to be made the further down the line youm the less money there is to be made and more and more a higher percentage of those people who lose money it's just the way it's the way the math works out um if you wait until something is a Proven model it's just it's going

to be harder um you know if if you want to I think the first person who uh figured out how to clean people's teeth probably did really well but now there's a dentist on every corner and so that's fine you can be a dentist we need them but um you're not going to make the boatloads that you might have made before anyway there you go um all right do you think a business that's completely online would be a good Business model um dog trading by online course only website videos on YouTube and social media they

they do work um income school has been that way now we're not staying just that way like I've been saying we're actually serving businesses and stuff now um providing the things we've been doing the things we've been teaching forever doing them for businesses because they need it um and uh they don't wh and complain as much as some people um most of you are Awesome by the way uh and most of you I don't really hear from in the comments and so I'm sure you're great um it's just some people are just awful whiny anyway

um no business owners they know that they need this stuff because without it they're Left Behind um and so that's where we are like we're just going to help you with this stuff you know if you want to stay online only that's that's fine that's still a good business model now I would Say that um information only businesses it's getting harder and harder because information we live in the information age and it's only getting to be more and more if somebody just wants to find information about training a dog a lot of people are going

to assume they can learn everything they need just from watching YouTube um you could probably help them better by giving them guidance like step-by-step guidance like you can give them something much More complete but if you want to stay completely online which is again where the majority of income schools business is too um it's best to not have it just be a course where they get information it's best to have it be something where they're I watched a video from Pat Flynn he put out earlier this year but he talks about people aren't paying for

information they'll pay to have their to save time they'll pay for Implementation um and then he talked about different ways that you can help people with implementation there's the service model where you do it for them but then's there's also the community model where you provide them with resources to get that more direct help and that's one thing we have in income school with our community it's that's so powerful because you always have people you can go ask um the far more specific questions when somebody has a dog that They're trying to do what you

taught them how to do and it's not working they can come and they can ask why um that's big um any any way that you can help them Implement that information take it a step further uh is great and that means you can't just pitch it as information when you try to sell it so you can stay completely online but you might need to do some um better marketing and you might need to create some offerings within there Maybe even a part where people can can reach out to you um to ask specific questions um

that's why we have our podcast in Project 24 questions from the community that we feel like Merit at broader discussion we do Whole podcast episodes about um it's why we have our masterminds people can come to The Mastermind and say I'm having a hard time with this what do you guys think and we get great ideas from other community members and oftentimes we can Provide valuable feedback so you can keep it online but it's probably not going to work as well to keep it totally passive just package up some information in a course and sell

it is um you're not going to sell that as well not anymore Jamie jumes says I have a lot of Fe of feed pages in Google search console do you know how to get rid of these um no um So Google search console when I look at all the pages that aren't in the index it's showing me a bunch of pages that have shown up in a Google search but the Google's like or that Google has found but the Google's like yeah I'm not indexing this that's fine it's totally fine there are oftentimes going to

be URLs that have big long strings that are just some sort of tag or just other stuff just that's generated um those they're always going To exist drives me nuts too as somebody who likes to see things nice and clean and orderly you know um but it's kind of like in Google analytics how um if you look at all the pages on your site that got any traffic um and you look over a long period of time like a year you're going to see this huge list of pages people have been to that are some

of them are URLs from your website but they all have like big long strings of text after that the main URL and it's only Got one page view in a year um you can't just you can't just remove all those from from there because it's a it's a page that once loaded you'll get search Pages because somebody types in a search on your website like they click the little search icon and type a Word in and search that across your website that search results page is a unique page with a unique URL based on that

search um those kinds of things are going to show up in analytics and often In search console um and a lot of those feed URLs I mean again you could potentially um you could potentially in the robots.txt file you could probably um specifically um no index your feed URLs and stuff and then maybe Google would just be more likely to ignore them but it's not hurting anything um and I don't know I don't just see really any real reason to do it but understand why the question um Because I've I wondered the same thing when

I first saw T says I'm from Bangladesh I'm thinking about setting up an LC getting a Us address to improve the business's credibility will this help with starting a new blog website yeah it'll help um the thing that will be the most important is can you show real um experience in your Niche can you can you show it can you demonstrate it you don't have to be a world expert on Any topic um but you you do need to be able to create value and show that you have experience that's part of that eat um

and so having a Us address better than not having one but I don't know I'm I'm concerned about this model it used to work fine for people who were anywhere in the world to create a blog get traffic from the US and make really good money um obviously it can still be done um but I almost Wonder I mean especially depending on your Niche I almost wonder if it's better to just like lean into who you are your experience that you really have um and and build a business around that even if you're still serving

um a western customer base um us and European maybe customer base maybe you're still serving that but again it's fine that you're from lsh so I don't know I'm I'm not 100% sure what what's going to be your best option but I I don't know that Trying to pretend like you're in the US is necessarily going to be that helpful anymore um Caroline says what do you think where do you think in-person networking fits to being an online business um I think it it's interesting um it C certainly helps with connecting with other businesses and

um content creators I mean you can go to content creator type events um I'm going to vidsummit in next month and there I will meet with tons of Other YouTubers across various niches um in those meetups oftentimes like you make really good connections at people that you could actually collaborate with and help grow each other's audiences um it can make a big difference there but also I mean as part of our our online business we're we're literally going to networking events here locally to meet with business owners and show them who we are what we

do there most people here in boisey have no idea What income school is because they're not in the space of online content creator um and so they have no idea that we're here that we have all these skills that they need and that we're legitimately local to them um and so we're getting out and letting them know and most of the work that we do for them we'll never see them for but we're still connecting with people and I think that's one of the big things is we're connecting with real people but we're Also expanding

our reach because we're becoming known in an adjacent industry that we can serve but it's not the industry that I'm reaching very well through this channel if that makes sense so it's clearly a much slower method of reaching people when it's one by one but the connections are often a lot stronger a lot deeper um and can be longer lasting and um yeah so I think that's that's a place Is it finds you people to either they can be clients but they could also be people that you could partner with in some way I think

that's a big part of it um Jamie asks oh let's see Kevin says uh the current Google update is going to take a month what do you why do you think it takes so long and what we expect um yeah it's weird I think part of it is they don't want to roll out all the new code and all the new stuff all at once I think it could be too much of A shock to the to the search engine to the search results um so they roll it out in pieces they assess if it

is working the way that they thought it would and then they roll out the next piece and they assess it and I don't know if they make tweaks on the fly or not I don't really know I don't see the ins and outs of that but I think they are putting out a piece seeing how that worked putting out the next piece seeing how that's working in Connection to what they've already put out so I think it can take a while especially with these core updates where there are a lot of things they're rolling out

um and during this time what what you're going to see is the search results are going to basically be changing maybe every day I mean they already do change some just from day to day but you're going to see much more volatility higher swings in um you know a page was ranking number one now it's Gone the next day it's back to number five and then it's gone again and then over like you'll see traffic swings and stuff um if you're getting like no traffic from Google right now you probably won't see traffic swings unless

you regain some traffic um and then you'll see the search results kind of settle in when as it wraps up and they'll just kind of be become The New Normal of what we're going to see for the next Little while um that's the way it tends to work and so Jamie ask how necessary do you think optimizing for Google is in 2024 and Beyond are the techniques of the blogging course obsolete um no they're not obsolete because the blogging course was not designed intentionally to rank on Google it was designed to create good content that

would help people and rank well in search engines and so there are things That I am changing so search analysis honestly I'm really not nearly as worried about quote competition plus the ways that we measure competition are basically useless now because there could be a thousand blog posts answering a particular question and maybe none of them are showing up on Google and that doesn't mean that it's an easy thing to rank for also we used to say a long time ago we haven't been saying this for actually a few years now but we used to

Say a long time ago that when you see a forum ranking number one well that's an easy target you can go rank for that because forums are the lowest form of content obviously that's not true today some people would like you to believe that I have been saying that that's still true again that hasn't been said in a long time I if anybody knows of a place in the blogging course anywhere where we still say that um let me know because I do remember deliberately Saying at least for the last two years that there are

many search queries for which user based content user generated content I should say is a better response and in those cases a forum is what should rank um nowadays they seem to rank for everything but uh I'm digressing again so it's not obsolete um but I'm not as worried about competition I'm also not as worried about um Uh I mean most of it is still relevant because what we're trying to do is we still want to answer spe specific questions that a user will have that's true for ranking on Google but also that's true for

helping people nobody wants to read an article that's just an article that doesn't actually have anything of interest for them um that said you can create content that's literally just interest pieces obviously that's been working Forever on in Magazines and stuff and newspapers but for the most part when people come to the internet and use search they're trying to find an answer to a question so we're still writing content kind of that way um so yeah search analysis it's mostly the same uh the way we write articles mostly the same there are some there's um

a couple of content types I'd like to add to the blogging system but the main thing is I would More strongly encourage people to not be overly dependent on organic traffic from search um but those blog posts still have a lot of value you can use social media to drive traffic to them but the blog post itself like that's core mey content that you can then use and repurpose on your social media and stuff to drive traffic to the main core content and if that core content is really valuable and helpful to people then that's

how you get them to want to Engage with your brand if you just have a website with nothing on it then what do you link to from Pinterest you know what are we trying to do like having a website is pretty vital for a business on the internet today um you've got to have a place that you own where you can send people and give them some sort of offering that they can buy or at least capture them through some sort of subscription whether it's email list or something else to get them to continue To

interact with you going forward that's something we can do on our own website um you can do those through other platforms and stuff but again like one way or another we need a place where people can come to that we have control over you don't control any social media platform you don't control YouTube you certainly don't control Google but you do control your website so we can use numerous other means to drive traffic to our website but when they're on our Website that's where we have the opportunity to interact with them more directly so um

there's still a lot of value there and blog content written article content is going to continue to attract traffic but also um I don't know it's got It's got huge value now I would probably not encourage people to write as much as they once did for most people I don't think you need hundreds or even thousands of blog posts I want you to Have really good resources on your website and then I want you to probably sooner than what we've taught in the past um I want you to start your Outreach I want you to

start your eat and your industry Outreach um participating industry and then and also social media we're going to do that earlier than we used to because we need that to get the traffic whereas before we could rely on Google so it's there are changes but the actual Process of coming up with topics and writing blog posts that I'm going to do almost exactly the same way as I have for years um so no I wouldn't say that the course is obsolete um and he says so you shouldn't create content to answer specific search queries then

how do you create helpful content yes you should so when we create really good resources on our website it should be in response to questions People are going to have it just doesn't need to it's it's mostly the same it's just we don't I'm probably not going to write as many articles that are just answering one small question I'm probably going to create articles that that maybe answer bigger questions or multiple questions that are closely related or at least that are part of a cluster of content that all support each other and guide people through

a process Of learning and exploration um when somebody is on the internet researching something I want them to be able to research it on my website not on Google I want them to be able to once they find my website find everything they want on that question and then their subsequent questions I want them to find it on my website and I want to make it clear that it's there so in my article I'm going to have good internal linking and It's not just throwing in a bunch of internal links for the sake of having

internal links it's thinking about what is the thought process of a user who's asking this question you know you're not gonna you're not going to be able to get in the head of every potential user but on average for most people if they're asking this question where are they what are they doing why are why do they have this question and if it's something you know something about it's easier for you To put yourself in those shoes and then you think about okay well then where do they need to go next and you steer them

that direction within your blog post and you guide them through this process so that by the time they're done learning first of all they've read six pages on your website instead of one or a few pages or a few sentences from one um they've read more content and they've engaged with your content much more they're much more likely to want to come Back there are websites on the internet that I know if I have questions about certain things that's where I'll go because I have found good content and there are plenty of websites I've been

to that I have no idea who who they were um because I found the one little thing I needed and they didn't steer me toward anything else um so I mentioned this um project 24 member who didn't lose traffic he told me that on average he gets just under five page views per Session on his website go look at your Google analytics today at some point and figure out on average on website how many page views you get per session I'm guessing it's not much more than one for most of us it's going to be

between one and 1.5 you get one just because there was a session created as long as one page loaded you get one you get 1.5 if half the people clicked to a second page he's getting almost five on average it's Because he's creating really good content that answers questions but that's steers them toward the next thing they need and the next thing they need and the next thing they need and before they know it they've read five pages of content on his website that's going to work a lot better than what most of us have

been doing um for a long time all right um uh let's see I'm just gonna take a couple more And then I've got a few kind of final thoughts okay um what's the market looking for selling your website you know I haven't looked at um like Empire flippers or any the other big platforms right now I'm guessing that the blog type websites that have been selling like crazy for years are probably mostly worthless right now because it's going to be based on income over the last 12 months and you're going to get a multiplier based

upon the Trajectory of the site and if everybody's sites went down or dropped like crazy they're just not very valuable on those same platforms though like Empire flippers you have businesses that have website that are selling back and forth all the time and they probably are doing just fine um those are often selling for seven figures um and that's because they're actual businesses not just blogs so anyway um appreciate all of you let's see Um what do you think about starting Randy says what do you think about starting your own Forum group or Community absolutely

um the project 24 Community is amazing um I am so glad we have it it is incredibly beneficial for every member that's in there um we also have the income school and channel makers insiders groups that were working on making more active but it's more Community focused rather than just being in email so instead of Joining an email list you join a free mini membership um I find that to be much more valuable now you can create your own Forum on your website or whatever and I think that's going to be really valuable for getting

people to want to stay it could also be that it you get a lot more traffic that way because it's user generated content we're seeing a lot of forums ranking not just Reddit and those forums aren't just Kora and others a lot of them are Niche Specific forums that exist on websites but getting that started getting people to actually generate content that's the trick um and so like if you're not attracting traffic to your website how do you get anyone to post um so you're probably going to need to do quite a bit of work

and Outreach to try to get people to your website in the first place um let's see um about project 24 two years is too long for me is there speed Coach mode with the same content um all the content in Project 24 is available from the second you join if you jump right in and just get to work and and learn everything you need to learn in six months cool fantastic you don't need it to take two years um I wouldn't expect a Blog alone to get to a full-time income even in two years uh

unless you're the outlier not anymore it used to work very easily that's why in Project 24 we teach So many other things we teach we do teach social media specifically we have Pinterest um we're working on others but what we teach in the YouTube system which in and of itself is amazing um but what we teach in there also works well and applies to Instagram and Facebook for reals and stuff um there's just so much in there that you can use uh to grow but for the most part nowadays I think most of us need

to be willing to consider stepping outside of the comfort Zone of just sitting behind a keyboard writing articles and hoping that that's going to drive enough traffic all by itself to make us an income just from ads and maybe some affiliate marketing um let's see Evan here asked a question just now are we talking about building businesses or creating blogs uh you missed the beginning of this part of this uh live building a business that has a Blog is way different than trying to build a Business from a Blog so which direction you go or

which way that you start I don't really care you may come into this thinking I don't know exactly what my business model is going to be I don't know what products I'm going to create but I'll start by creating content and offering Consulting um again we talked about that earlier if you want to know more details about that you can can go back and um watch the beginning of this Life you can start there if you're just like I don't know I don't know what to offer people but I know a lot about this topic

I want to talk about it and I want to do something in this space the opportunities are going to open themselves up to you so start with content and offer Consulting but be willing to probably do a little bit more than just blogging start with you know get into social media um at very least get interviewed On other people's podcasts if you're not going to create your own or your own YouTube channel or whatever even consider collaborating with YouTubers providing them with cool resources or even you know doing some video with them even if you're

not going to create your own YouTube channel but use those social media platforms to your advantage and build a brand build something that people will want to be involved with and your ideas will come as you're creating Content you're going to see what people's needs are and what questions they have and you can create a business on the other hand if you have a business that's not yet really online you should be creating content to support that business that's an area where right now I'm going because so many people that wanted to do content first

are so upset that they just they don't want to have anything to do with this anymore and that's fine and so for my business We know that there's a huge opportunity because there are millions of businesses out there who don't have a strong online presence and even if they do they're trying social media and they're doing it totally wrong they um and they don't have any real content on their website and they certainly don't know how to do video um and so we can teach them and or do it for them in fact we started

um we started on this like in November I think but we just finished putting together a Course an enti not just a course but a new membership for business owners who want to learn digital marketing so we teach them building a website we teach them the basics of blogging but also social media um Google my business um and YouTube specifically we teach them a lot of what they would need to be able to really get started in that um and we're going to support that side of things too so we're talking about both Absolutely um

all right I wish we could go on forever I do have just a couple things I wanted to say here um at the end um some of you may have noticed on the YouTube channel a little bit ago I first of all I found this feature I don't know how new it is on YouTube where you can kind of set your community rules and so when when somebody goes to write a comment on your YouTube channel like it shows them hey just so you know abide by these rules and I think it only Shows it

to them one time um but they basically agreed to that right um I'm Gonna Keep Those rules up to date and I'm gon to abide by them um something that I heard recently on a podcast that really struck me is that leaders leaders set the tone that's their job that's a big part of their job right so here at my business I set the tone for what what our culture looks like here on this channel there my channel I built this Channel I set the tone and I'm not going to let people take that and

and run with it I'm not going to let people um hijack this community because that's what we are this isn't this is a YouTube channel where I create content but we're a community and we support each other and I want it to be that way I want it to feel that way and that's the tone I'm setting so here's the Deal comments on the YouTube channel I am 100% in favor of debate and disagreement 100% people can disagree with me I've been accused on Twitter which is where a lot of the um most angry people

seem to like to hang out um I've been accused quite a bit of censoring people who I disagree with it's not true you can go through comments on numerous YouTube videos that I've published over the last nine years and you can find a ton of Comments from people who disagreed with what I said some that I even replied to and had a discussion with that's not a problem for me what I have a problem problem with is people who want to be negative and tear others down I don't care if it's me you're tearing down

or someone else someone who I who I had to talk with on a video maybe an interview or someone else who comments that's not what we're here for we're here to support each other because All of us need that we need people to be in our corner and that's the community that I want to have and so that's the community that I'm going to Foster so we can have respectful disagreements and discussions I would love to learn from you as much as you learn from me all in favor of that okay but I will not

hesitate to remove comments and even block people who choose to attack others and to tear them down there's way too much of that on the Internet and this YouTube channel this YouTube channel is not going to be that platform okay all right um I hope that this has been really helpful this is the direction we're going you're going to see videos on this channel that sometimes may have nothing to do with blogging but they're going to be 100% relevant to what's actually going to work for you going forward so um I hope you'll still want

to watch them if you don't that's fine if there's A video I make that doesn't feel relevant to you I don't expect you to watch it um but that's where we're headed so thanks everyone for being here I hope to be able to continue to support you on your journey and I hope that you can be here to help support me on my journey too obviously we know that for all of us in the content creation space it's been um especially in the blog content creation space it's been a heck of a roller coaster ride

um that impacts Me um a lot too so I'm not just here like some rich guy looking down and saying look ah all you guys um just do it the right way no this has impacted all of us um quite a bit so um let's be here for each other let's make it happen you guys are awesome um thanks we'll see you all soon